Online Exclusives
12.17.19
L’altro figlio
Though we mocked Dad mercilessly, our mocking was such as to lead him on convincingly. Dad! There is hope for you if, say, you are struck by lightning. So often did he sulk out on the balcony that he did seem to be inviting a strike. Or a stumble. [...]
12.10.19
The Habits of Hummingbirds
It is nearly one thirty, lunch is over, and I am waiting for the afternoon mail. It is what I have to look forward to, the mail, the UPS box delivered to my cubicle each day. I do not have plans once the mail has arrived. [...]
12.06.19
An Interview
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
Where nostalgia is the pain arising from moving away from a loved place, solastalgia occurs without you going anywhere; it is the landscape that “leaves” from around you. The last decade—and especially the last two or three years—have seen an intensification and a globalization of this distinctive Anthropocene effect [...]
11.29.19
Memorydrive
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
Kintsugi, an ancient Japanese art form, entails repairing cracked pottery by reattaching the shards with gold lacquer powder mixed with the adhesive. This is done so that a warm glow appears to radiate from the jagged tracery made by the fractures between the glued parts, emphasizing the “scars” that define a critical moment in the history of the pottery piece. [...]
11.26.19
Two Poems
When as a resistance fighter for Greece, Xenakis heard the din of warfare but not the bullets individually, he determined in recollection that his composing would respect the mass phenomenon, and yes, he did later in life go out in a storm to time intervals between the lightning strikes. [...]
11.22.19
Curator
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
There were clear indications the cloud was moving again, headed their way. Where it passed it stripped the remaining leaves from the already crippled trees, left soil and water poisoned, stripped the flesh off any creature, living or dead, and then whittled away at the bones. [...]
11.19.19
Three Poems
We scuttle to a stop at the lake edge,
at the fat plop of a frog’s retreat
we always barely fail to see. Here
we’re ankled in spawn grown bolder:
earth crumbling aside instead of down, [...]
at the fat plop of a frog’s retreat
we always barely fail to see. Here
we’re ankled in spawn grown bolder:
earth crumbling aside instead of down, [...]
11.15.19
After Maria
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
I was excited to help. The response here, officially, was bad. A lot of us knew we needed to react to that somehow. We wanted the victims to know that not everybody here felt like he did. But also, yeah, that’s the word for it, excited. [...]
11.08.19
In the Mist of Everything
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
Shira thought she would buy furniture for the bedroom first. Kevin made attempts at saving his garden. Doreen pushed the dough down with the heel of her hand. Gabriel tried a new yoga pose. Cynthia and Steve went for a drive. Toby said, The weather is just great. Marybeth wore the same dress two days in a row. [...]
11.05.19
The Apartment Dweller’s Alphabetical Dreambook
by Kij Johnson
An abalone shell in a dream signifies a new home.
To be afraid in a dream signifies strife along with danger, which seems obvious enough.
Clear air in a dream signifies success in one’s business affairs. [...]
To be afraid in a dream signifies strife along with danger, which seems obvious enough.
Clear air in a dream signifies success in one’s business affairs. [...]
11.01.19
Disputed Site Sestinas
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies
You would not go there. Mountainous
ships gather in at the beach
of Alang. Each will feed 100 mouths
broken down into elements
by the young. Sent out between the places
we have scoured so now our harbors push it past [...]
ships gather in at the beach
of Alang. Each will feed 100 mouths
broken down into elements
by the young. Sent out between the places
we have scoured so now our harbors push it past [...]
10.29.19
The Technologies of Pucks
Mornings and evenings, on their way to and from the pond, the boys would hear the old Tilson woman calling to her cat. [...]
10.22.19
Because It Has a Surface
by Greg Nissan
It’s civic because it has a surface. It’s worse than it seems, but at least it keeps seeming. Though I become butter in the face of such hard-knifed buildings, I’d like to locate a harmony that does not equal plan. That doesn’t tilt the map toward a penthouse. [...]
10.15.19
Three Poems
by Mark Irwin
On the highway, saw the eyes of a sheep staring through slats
of a trailer transport. Who?
I thought for both of us. The choices
I had; those it didn’t. [...]
of a trailer transport. Who?
I thought for both of us. The choices
I had; those it didn’t. [...]
10.08.19
Two Poems
I wanted to take you out shoplifting
mascara, reenacting all the scenes from
Marie Antoinette. I wanted us to fall
back repeatedly into a bed of extravagant
dresses, eat really good chocolates, listen
to even better music, smell really good.
Is that too literal? [...]
mascara, reenacting all the scenes from
Marie Antoinette. I wanted us to fall
back repeatedly into a bed of extravagant
dresses, eat really good chocolates, listen
to even better music, smell really good.
Is that too literal? [...]
10.01.19
The Afterforest
09.17.19
Borderlands
Late flies large as nearly extinct black bees
burrow in wisteria
when the desert has all the carcasses [...]
burrow in wisteria
when the desert has all the carcasses [...]
09.10.19
The Dolphin’s Face
The dolphin appeared in a cloud of dust, a soft red bloom on the horizon that blossomed into a cyclone over the course of the day. Wade Walton spotted the arrival around noon from his perch at the motel’s front desk, where he briefly wondered if he might be seeing a mirage. [...]
09.03.19
Six Poems
revived after stasis to regrow roots and ribcage of willowy human shape the child emerges lifespan long or short when starved phobias of insects and mean dogs invisible in the trees walk backwards [...]
08.27.19
Three Poems
by Dawn Tripp
In the tender early silence of a day you imagine belongs to you
already the contours of the night before forgotten and what that night told
when you went through the dark house
marking disturbances of light [...]
already the contours of the night before forgotten and what that night told
when you went through the dark house
marking disturbances of light [...]
08.20.19
Three Poems
by Susan Lewis
Today is an apparent day of shadows piercing timeworn walls, of melt & freeze & brutal disregard, of brutality in its frightened guise, of mastery in fear & fear in mastery, of fear in its brutal guise [...]
08.13.19
Godfather Drosselmeier’s Tears
Tinfoil-hat alert: I asked God for more,
sharpening my quills and gathering reams of paper to write books
as an antidote to all I was not! [...]
sharpening my quills and gathering reams of paper to write books
as an antidote to all I was not! [...]
08.06.19
Stray Voltage
by Kim Chinquee
After my grandma died, my uncle had their dog Lady euthanized. I’m not sure why. My grandfather went into assisted living. My uncle took over the farm. He rarely invited anybody over. [...]
07.30.19
Sandy Szymanski
Sandy Szymanski was worried that she was turning into a duck, but the worst thing about her predicament by far was how nobody seemed to care. “Eh, I doubt it,” her landlord said when he came to inspect the transom window through which some hooligan had thrown, overnight, a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. [...]
07.23.19
Eleven Poems
From Dyeu Ary
Pour liquids over the body
Boil liquids into her body
into the silence she becomes
waif, monolith, endless roads
Cloud-gold-dust larger than earth [...]
Boil liquids into her body
into the silence she becomes
waif, monolith, endless roads
Cloud-gold-dust larger than earth [...]
07.16.19
Bamiyan
She wanders aimlessly through age, age
being a nutrient that washes from the cliff face
into the soil.
Absence a rhythm in the daily round, rows
carved into furrows in the ground or the folds
of the robe, not planted with seed. [...]
being a nutrient that washes from the cliff face
into the soil.
Absence a rhythm in the daily round, rows
carved into furrows in the ground or the folds
of the robe, not planted with seed. [...]
07.09.19
Ghost Child
He has already, over the course of months, designed his own sanctuary, his own adventure. It has yet to be built, but it will be an ordinary house, except for the cellar, where a secret tunnel leads far away into deep woods, to his real home, enormous and impregnable and peopled by machines to take care of all his needs. [...]
07.02.19
Credenza
We sipped a fumé blanc, much too good for us. Elsa, quite content with a weak strain of iced tea, happy to be here at all. We had not known from lively e-mails and upbeat telephone chats that her persistent cough had taken a turn to the prospect of dying. [...]
06.25.19
Three Poems
by Peter Myers
In the language of carbon wealth I sang myself into shape. May the pieces fall in accordance with natural law, I thought, and the world will slide into place. Complicity was as capital in the vernacular of the times, so my counsel sold to blight-ridden conifers desperate to restart life. [...]
06.18.19
Earthrise Tango
After Giantess declared her love, and conditions were set by Moon—build me a silver body, attire me, hinder my roll through space to attach the silvery limbs
—the two outliers danced until lightfall, where, on Venus, each day is longer than an Earth’s year. And dance on and on they did. [...]
—the two outliers danced until lightfall, where, on Venus, each day is longer than an Earth’s year. And dance on and on they did. [...]
06.11.19
Five Laments for Our Good Earth
“I wanted ours to be a perfect
union,” he tells us at the table in the back, candle out.
“I wanted every desire to be balanced, exactly,
by generosity. And stasis to be a form
of flight. But I was yammering
in my sleep. [...]
union,” he tells us at the table in the back, candle out.
“I wanted every desire to be balanced, exactly,
by generosity. And stasis to be a form
of flight. But I was yammering
in my sleep. [...]
06.04.19
From Nothing but Objects
After Rosmarie Waldrop
Sometimes I see a transparent profile, shadow-self with its thready tendrils turning to face the absence of a face framed by the window opposite. Selflessness is a complicated structure in that it doesn’t exist. The speaker ever-hovers just outside the door, listening. She went whichaway, grinding her teeth to shadow. [...]
05.28.19
Five Poems
I have in common with old window glass
a pleasant warping
of whatever forces through
In this sickly light the defanged
dogs slurp their sludges. I intone as taught
“Here no mystery is” [...]
a pleasant warping
of whatever forces through
In this sickly light the defanged
dogs slurp their sludges. I intone as taught
“Here no mystery is” [...]
05.21.19
Quiver’s Longing (AM Locus)
An Excerpt from Trafik
AM Locus has a fabricated atmosphere, humid and breathable, unexpectedly dense in the organic compounds of living things once there in profusion, but now long gone. Of the landscape, all that remains are deep creases and ridges gyring in all directions, with barely a trace of biological activity. [...]
05.16.19
In the Next Night
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals
In agitation along sleep’s surface
dreams the monster, the angular, the slimy, the anything goes, the corpse
who strokes the tigers with rather weak jaws
in a jump cut, on an icy blue couch, red queen
on mute–– [...]
dreams the monster, the angular, the slimy, the anything goes, the corpse
who strokes the tigers with rather weak jaws
in a jump cut, on an icy blue couch, red queen
on mute–– [...]
05.14.19
Three Poems
by Jun-long Lee
Though no one is watching, an opening in the hedges reveals a gap where entry is possible.
Inside, an entity multiplies, but how can I know this. The broodself is invisible and smells like
before, which is the only way to know that it happened. It crawls out in unknown ways on
unknown legs, identical because there is no other form or sound. [...]
Inside, an entity multiplies, but how can I know this. The broodself is invisible and smells like
before, which is the only way to know that it happened. It crawls out in unknown ways on
unknown legs, identical because there is no other form or sound. [...]
05.09.19
Walking in the Dark
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals
What they had in common was they were smokers; everyone was a smoker then. Those three, though, they smoked to live. Cigarettes! There the cigarette would be, raised to the lips. The lips opening, only a little. The smoke drifting across the roof of the mouth. The lungs filling—this is how they recognized one another, in the green sea, green as grass, by streams of water green as glass. [...]
05.07.19
Everything Appears Rimmed or Studded with Gold
An Excerpt from The Color Inside a Melon
by John Domini
Here at the top of an abandoned palazzo, they’d set up a club for the night. Risto’s assailant was one of the bouncers. Up here, at penthouse level, the building had only two apartments, and now Risto found himself pinned against the railing of a terrazzo, and the rawboned creep who held him, just five, ten minutes earlier, had stood collecting the cover charge outside the apartment door. [...]
05.02.19
A Nightmare
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals
by Bennett Sims
Even though I knew that this was impossible—even though I recognized, in my rational mind, my waking or my daylight mind, that the shopping carts had to have been gathered from a grocery store this century—I could not shake the impression of a far architect, or fathom any contemporary consciousness that could have constructed this. [...]
04.25.19
Haunt
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals
Two months into my time as Fred and Elsie’s ghost, they wake up in the middle of the night to find me at the kitchen table, staring at the Ouija board unfolded over the unfinished pine. I didn’t mean to be staring at the board when they came down the stairs. I’d snuck down after they’d gone to bed to skim from their leftovers and it was already there, waiting. [...]
04.23.19
Matters of Conception
Reproducing the Unknowable
Our wombs are for many of us unknowable until inhabited, made knowable by the inside taps at the doors and walls of our bodies, our centers of gravity shifted, our balance of weight and even of power redistributed, disturbed, sleep-deprived, and pushed up against furniture we used to slide easily by. [...]
04.18.19
Twelve Hours
A Selected Text from Conjunctions:72, Nocturnals
The first time I crossed the equator, I stopped for a photo. People usually do. I had come to work in a small clinic in a coffee-farming village in southwestern Uganda, just to the south of the world’s belt. I grew up in the midlatitudes: long summer days and long winter nights, the swing of light and dark like a rocking hammock. I thought of the equator as a human idea—a line on a spinning globe. Its tyranny was a shock. [...]
04.16.19
Two Poems
by Elaine Equi
In the first dream, the dog is disguised as a cat.
In the second dream, when I pet him, the dog turns into chocolate.
In the third dream, the dog is a ball of dirty yarn which I scoop up
and lay over my chest to muffle the sound of my rapidly beating heart. [...]
In the second dream, when I pet him, the dog turns into chocolate.
In the third dream, the dog is a ball of dirty yarn which I scoop up
and lay over my chest to muffle the sound of my rapidly beating heart. [...]
04.02.19
The Inside Story
Jing Street, where I live, is a long, narrow street with many coffee shops and teahouses. Sitting in my third-floor study, I can see inside the “Island” coffee shop across the street. This small shop does a good business; it’s almost always packed. I frequent this shop, too. I secretly call Hoh Dao, its owner, “Mr. Perfect.” [...]
03.26.19
The Gaslighter’s Lament
Keller,
We don’t know each other. Not well. I’ve seen you in your rental body, standing at the windows beyond the cubicles, looking out at the wheat fields. I’ve seen you in the fifth-floor steams. We sat so close that my breath mixed with yours in the wet air. In the lap pool, too, the waves that rippled from my breaststroke rippled over your skin. [...]
We don’t know each other. Not well. I’ve seen you in your rental body, standing at the windows beyond the cubicles, looking out at the wheat fields. I’ve seen you in the fifth-floor steams. We sat so close that my breath mixed with yours in the wet air. In the lap pool, too, the waves that rippled from my breaststroke rippled over your skin. [...]
03.19.19
In the Permanent Collection
Do this in memory of my mother
and of my mother’s mother
Here is this lacquered box (Fig. 100.5) inlaid
with their blood [...]
and of my mother’s mother
Here is this lacquered box (Fig. 100.5) inlaid
with their blood [...]
03.12.19
Nietzsche at Night
after collapsing at the plaza fountain in Turin Nietzsche gave up
coherent speech and stayed alive somewhere else for almost twelve years
his unmapped terrain resembled a canvas painted black in successive
luminous opacities of backlit abyss, if he turned on a television
this is what he saw, if he closed his eyes, if he looked out the window
again unshielded night [...]
coherent speech and stayed alive somewhere else for almost twelve years
his unmapped terrain resembled a canvas painted black in successive
luminous opacities of backlit abyss, if he turned on a television
this is what he saw, if he closed his eyes, if he looked out the window
again unshielded night [...]
03.05.19
The Page Turner
by Tova Reich
For once they all agreed, it would be the concert of the season, the return of the prodigy son. The Jerusalem music scene was in heat—survivors, empty seat fillers, remnants planted on their subscriptions, but from the neck up, in brainpans that went on ticking, still the strictest standards, the highest expectations. [...]
02.26.19
Three Poems
by Ariel Yelen
Winter was like my house: I showed
myself—human, bare but for my clothing,
and the blood boiling, the geranium,
and other gifts. Bare but for the objects
that claimed me. [...]
myself—human, bare but for my clothing,
and the blood boiling, the geranium,
and other gifts. Bare but for the objects
that claimed me. [...]
02.19.19
Three Poems
My mother cracked each day open like a gutted fish.
Her hours, a tarp draped over a stranger’s head.
The way grief works:
a mirror the chemical
that ruins the body,
a window, a small blue prayer
gone missing. [...]
Her hours, a tarp draped over a stranger’s head.
The way grief works:
a mirror the chemical
that ruins the body,
a window, a small blue prayer
gone missing. [...]
02.12.19
Five Poems from Letters to the Alphabet
(I want nothing short of not being brief. It’s a peccadillo. Chickens take longer
Than they did. If I wasn’t kind today, it’s because I am feeling out of sorties like a movie
That ends before anything gets said that might resolve the question
Of why anyone would spend time making or watching a movie, or a bed. [...]
Than they did. If I wasn’t kind today, it’s because I am feeling out of sorties like a movie
That ends before anything gets said that might resolve the question
Of why anyone would spend time making or watching a movie, or a bed. [...]
02.05.19
A Room without a Door
I was beginning to sense a pattern. Not that I knew what the pattern was, just that one was coming into view. It had something to do with the babysitter. I didn’t hire her, and refuse to be blamed. Sharon hired the babysitter; I spotted the pattern. [...]
01.29.19
Dream Duets
by Matt Reeck
“I had a problem for you, and you didn’t solve it.” “It was imaginary.” “Not all that appears reappears. It may be only once that you glimpse Pythagoras.” “Did you say Pythagoras?” “Might could be, apparently so.” “Was your problem related to math?” “Of an existential dimension.” “That’s the sort that interested me before my career set in.” [...]
01.22.19
Night Philosophy
by Fanny Howe
The clatter of rain has a personal meaning.
This is the time to meditate or write down your dreams.
But the lover can do neither, can only wander
From room to room trying not to spill what’s so precious. [...]
This is the time to meditate or write down your dreams.
But the lover can do neither, can only wander
From room to room trying not to spill what’s so precious. [...]
01.15.19
Wonders of the Invisible World
Outside the stars were fading and the sky was slowly rosying at the edges when we found the skeleton. At first it was visible only as a clutch of white daggers, thickly clotted with spiderwebs, compressed between the plaster wall and the heavy wooden timbers. I don’t know what I expected it to be. [...]
01.08.19
Goat
On the bus, we were told to remember everything, to testify, testify, testify. We’d heard this many times before. Remember and testify, they would say, in order that this or that bad thing does not happen again. I harbored no such faith in remembering. Nor in testimony. I fail to believe in them still. [...]
01.01.19
The Bystander by Gina Berriault
Someone shouted at me to grab a blanket or a coat or something for crissakes, the narrator of The Bystander says, and wrap your old man up, because after assaulting the woman the narrator’s father liked best, and after running out with nothing on but the soap from the bath he’d been taking with her, the narrator’s father is standing on the street, shouting imprecations at her, [...]
